APIs are highly useful and take a lot of the manual work out of all sorts of tasks. However, they’re only useful to you if you can find what you’re looking for when you need them. Otherwise, you’ll be spending even more time and effort trying to find them before you can even use them. Here are some top tips on creating an API catalog, so you can find them with ease.
1. Pick Out An API Management Tool
The good news is that you don’t have to do all of the API management manually. There are lots of different management tools(ahem, Stoplight) on the market that will handle a lot of the work and make it easy to navigate your new API catalog. These are especially useful if you don’t have an in-house dev team who can put together that catalog for you.
For example, you can pick from options like Stoplight, Swaggerhub, or Postman to name a few. They all have good features depending on what level you’re at and what you’re aiming to do with your API program, so try a few and see what works best for your needs.
2. Arrange Your APIs By Type And Function
If you’re going to have an API catalog, then you need to make it easy to find what you’re looking for in there. “When you start organizing your APIs, you’ll need to remember that they may well sit under different categories,” says Anna Dean, a tech writer at Revieweal and Dissertation writing services reviews.
For example, if you have SMS APIs, they could be used for both customer communication and messaging staff. As such, it would fit under marketing APIs and remote collaboration APIs too.
Another example is having a set of retail APIs that are collected together. These are good options for companies looking to create self-serve options, as that creates new revenue streams that will benefit you long term
3. Organize By Internal And External APIs
As well as organizing by type, you’ll want to split your APIs by external and internal APIs too. There are likely some APIs that you only use internally that you wouldn’t want to be seen by the public for security reasons. Having them properly labeled as such will stop this from happening.
While external APIs get a lot of attention, internal APIs are the workhorses employees use daily to run the company and serve customers, and they are a critical part of the API journey.
There are many similarities between building internal vs. external APIs, and many of the same challenges and hurdles still exist for standing up an API program regardless of what kind of APIs will be produced. There are ample opportunities for things to go wrong. And without some guardrails in place, API programs can quickly spin out of control and suffer from a lack of standardization, limited visibility into the program, duplicated efforts, and reduced usability and user adoption.
4. Use An Example API Catalog As A Guide
If you’re not sure how to put your API catalog together, using an example can help a lot. These show you how others have created their catalogs, so you can find the right way to organize all the APIs you use.
The Facebook API catalog is a good place to start, as it shows you how they’ve put theirs together. It’s a good example of a well-made catalog and offers lots of examples that you can use yourself.
If you want more ideas on how you can make your catalog as good as it can be, you can talk to your team and ask for their ideas. They should have ideas to put forward that make it easier to access the APIs that they use. That makes it easier for certain tasks to get done, making everything more efficient.
5. Work Out Your Access Levels
When organizing your APIs, you want to consider who you want to be able to access them. There are some that should only be used by security or IT departments, for example. Creating separate collections per department increases your security and ensures that sensitive data is kept secure too.
There are always recent examples of companies that haven’t secured their systems well enough that you should learn from. For example, the recent LastPass breach showed just how vital it is to keep your data secure. As well as having certain access levels needed for some APIs, it’s a very smart idea to bring in 2-factor authentication and better password protection policies in general.
Regular security checks and a strategy around authentication and authorization of your API strategy can help ensure your access levels remain solid and your APIs remain secure. For more auth strategy, check out this recent blog post.
6. Conduct Audits Regularly
Once you’ve done the work in putting the API catalog together, you need to keep going back regularly to check on it. Regular checks ensure that your APIs are all up-to-date and functional. You’ll also be able to pick up on any issues quickly before they cause problems for you.
When conducting audits, ensure that you include your vendors and dependencies in them too. That way, you’re covering all angles and ensuring that all your APIs and setups are up to date.
Your dev team should work on a way to keep APIs updated to current versions, so there shouldn’t be a drop in productivity if an APU is suddenly out of date. Doing this helps improve security, too, as APIs are updated to be as secure as possible with every new version.
7. Ensure Everyone Can Use Your Catalog
Again, once that API catalog is completed, you need to ensure that all stakeholders in your company can actually access it. If you don’t make it available to everyone, silos get easily created. You run the risk of APIs in the catalog being duplicated by other teams who may not know of their existence because they don’t have access to the catalog. Socialize your catalog internally, and ensure that all relevant stakeholders have visibility into it to avoid duplication. This will be why you’ll make different collections for different departments. That allows them to access the APIs that they need specifically.
Again, check with your teams to see if they’re able to find and access the APIs that they need. Doing this ensures that the catalog works as intended and everyone is able to access the tools they use.
8. Keep Documentation Updated
Finally, you’ll want to ensure that all API documentation is kept up to date over time. That’s especially true when your company organizes its APIs by documentation. Regularly updated and detailed documentation will make or break your developers’ experience with your API catalog, so it’s a best practice to update your docs whenever something changes. You can use an API specification like OpenAPI to allow your documentation to be read by API documentation generators, making it easier to find and sort through APIs.
Creating an API catalog is easier than you’d think once you know how. These quick tips are just the start though; for more, check out our other blogs. You’ll be able to find just the right API that you need whenever you may need it. You’ll wonder how you did without it!
Jenny Han is a writer for Case study writing service and Essay Help. She covers APIs and business tech. She’s also a blogger for College assignment help.
